James Cameron Says AI Replacing Actors Is ‘Horrifying’

James Cameron thinks the idea of generative AI replacing actors is “horrifying.”

The Avatar: Fire and Ash director — who sits on the board of Stability AI — has previously been positive about the use of artificial intelligence in filmmaking but there are limits to how he feels it should be used.

The Oscar-winning moviemaker hailed motion capture the “purest form” of performance and admitted he thinks it was a “mistake” that he was reluctant to “pull the curtain back” on the CGI-assisted technique when working on 2009’s Avatar in order to keep the “magic unblemished” for audiences.

Cameron stressed how different motion capture and AI are in the filmmaking process.

Speaking on CBS Sunday Mornings, he said: “For years, there was this sense that, ‘Oh, they’re doing something strange with computers and they’re replacing actors,’ when in fact, once you really drill down and you see what we’re doing, it’s a celebration of the actor-director moment, and the actor-to-actor moment. It’s a celebration of, I call it, the sanctity of the actor’s performance moment. Now, go to the other end of the spectrum, and you’ve got generative AI, where they can make up a character, they can make up an actor. They can make up a performance from scratch with a text prompt. It’s like, no. That’s horrifying to me. That’s the opposite. That’s exactly what we’re not doing.”

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The Titanic director insisted he never wants to “replace” actors with technology.

He added: “I don’t want a computer doing what I pride myself on being able to do with actors. I don’t want to replace actors, I love working with actors.”

However, Cameron does feel AI has a place in the industry because it could be helpful in “making VFX cheaper.”

He said: “Right now, imaginative films, fantastic films, science-fiction films — they’re starting to die off as a breed because they’re expensive and the theatrical marketplace has contracted, and now studios are only comfortable spending those kinds of dollar amounts with blue-chip IP, that which we’ve seen, that which we know. I mean, a movie like Avatar would never get made in that environment. That was brand-new IP; nobody had ever heard of it.”

And he doesn’t think generative AI would undermine his work, but rather will make filmmakers push themselves more.

He said: “It might [undermine the work], but it also causes us to have to set our bar to a very disciplined level, and to continue to be out-of-the-box imaginative … what generative AI can’t do is create something new that’s never been seen.”

“If you think about it, the models — it’s a magic trick, what they can do is quite astonishing. But the models are trained on everything that’s ever been done before that; it can’t be trained on that which has never been done.”

“So you will innately see, essentially, all of human art and human experience put into a blender, and you’ll get something that is kind of an average of that. So what you can’t have is that individual screenwriter’s unique lived experience and their quirks. You won’t find the idiosyncrasies of a particular actor… the act of performance, the act of actually seeing an artist creating in real time will become sacred, more so.”

Avatar: Fire and Ash opens in theaters on December 19.